Month: December 2014

Recently in November, SHC hosted our first-ever Clinical Revolution, bringing in all of our DONs across the 10 states that we serve. They are beautiful, inclined to think of others with the passion of their hands and the truth of their skill-sets.

In long-term care, we serve the sickest and most vulnerable, and even abandoned in some cases. Our DONs face cruel sickness on a daily basis…angry family members, stakeholders who are broken, fighting it out on a daily basis, taking care of beloved residents while coping with personal issues that sometimes seem like a tumultuous mountain that grows out of the earth – and they can’t keep up.

Our DONs came with fatigue, and maybe even some hopelessness. Our CEO Joe and other greats leaders, like Kathy O., listened with compassion, dissected their survey results, discussed new tools and clinical offerings, that it was, and would be, worth the wait.

God spoke too.

‘I see you,’ He said. ‘I hear you. I know your pains, and your soulful thoughts that only I can hear.’

He said to trust Him, to let go of the past hurts, regrets, mistakes and to let go and be all that was capable within.

“Don’t run,’ He said. ‘I appointed you for such a time as this. You are called.’

Nursing, after all, is a vocation; service to a population who helped build cities and communities, teach and raise us, farm the soil and fight in distant lands.

What if…

What if the power of the spiritual could heal when nothing else could?

What if we could defy pain through compassionate listening and tender music?

What if we could pray over pressure sores and the power to “heal thy wound” is real?

What if we could prescribe the spiritual of scripture and sew it into torment, or the physicality of what hurts?

What if we could stop a fall or prevent a negative act from happening because we encourage a patient to simply use her walker, because she is beautiful doing it and she just needs a little help?

What if.

What if the power of the spiritual and clinical together could reduce hospital readmits because the patient is just scared? And the qualified team of nurses can handle their physical ails, it was just a frightening moment…

What if we could comfort an angry family member, not because they are really mad at the care we give, but simply because they feel helpless to hope their loved one gets better?

What if.

And together that morning, we started to renew, restore, believe. Because a revolution takes a vision and the belief wrapped around it in the possible. Because risk is only failure when there is no risk at all.

So we let go, and we didn’t run, realizing we didn’t have to. A mosaic of peoples, skills, cultures, traditions, beliefs, fitting into the puzzle of a perfect mission, an army linked arm-in-arm on the front line of the care battlefield. Each one a fortress. Each one serving a pivotal role. Each one skilled. Purposeful and fulfilled, not because every day was absolutely easy, but because each day was powerful in the journey of the destiny of a real revolution.

I say we run toward the revolution of the possible now, for we are the future of what the world can only imagine. We are the intervention of hope, the innovation of true change, of really healing, of pioneering our way and shoveling toward figuring it out together.

Maybe turnover is related to fear of failure and not distress of the position. Maybe turnover can be overtaken and combated by simply believing that a new future for our people is worth the fight of a good revolution, and because we have the right tools, weaponry, armor. A new world awakens.

Imagine we control the regulatory world around us. When an adverse event happens, we can begin the “four step process.” Now.

What if.

That’s the song of a revolution: controlling our world, not waiting for it to sword our gut with the skewer of the sting so that we can’t fight anymore because the fight has left us.

That is our calling. Together, we are the future of what is possible now.

The essence of the spiritual is within. It means that you can be your own spiritual entity of light. We have brought God inside the workplace, inside our for-profit culture, and have been blessed with significant essence of that which is about the presence of what is real, in the light of matter.

Many people ask about and yet fear the spiritual realm in the workplace for real reasons, although through education and the deliberate intention of respect for another’s practice or faith tradition, we have created an environment where we can thrive in the roundness of who we are, un-watered down, spiritual skin intact, just not rubbed off on someone else, so to speak. Simply said, it is a modeling of dignified compassion. It is a new awakening of what being spiritual means with discernment and decision-making in the realm of profit, where humankind and profit-making find themselves inside the same sentence, and a spiritual injection into the fabric of a culture begins to look at the co-worker as a neighbor, a colleague and a friend, someone to care about, to rejoice with, to pray with, to cry for, all wrapped up in the thumb of life, because life flows at work and need never stop, and kindness has its place, and a profit is stewardship, the best of its kind, so that people have purpose and place together in market-borne demands.

Money is good. Unabashed courage of the inner life is even better. Mastering one’s own solitude is boundless.

But most companies are just not ready for God in the workplace. The misnomer that God cannot live where we spend so much time making critical decisions based on profits and margins and people, while untrue, has a well-tuned media life in that the fear is real even though the cause is often based on the assumption that spiritual air cannot come through the door from 9 to 5 because the world says it can’t. But the First Amendment allows the free practice thereof, as does Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, where religion has its place of consideration in the workplace. So, we have opened the door to the experience within a framework – and why not? The rules of the workplace operate within policies and plans, systems and processes, so why not spirituality? Our framework around the model has given it the freedom to flourish and everyone within the walls of employment the right to worship or not to worship, but the freedom to choose.

But even if simulating our model is not happening for you any time soon in your workplace, remember this and weld it to your heart: the spiritual resides in you. The spiritual essence is in you, even in the workplace, where you can practice in the crevices and taffy of the soul who you are in thought and mind, and in deed. While faith can be a sensory experience, faith is a decision, and you can make that decision right there at your work table or office desk. Attach affection to reasoning. Reduce hatred with the practice of forgiveness. Embrace your religion, respect a non-believer. Love those in the world because they are worth it – many in the challenged matrix of life where noise pounds like incessant drums. And they can’t hear. Hear for them and help battle the weapon of dissonant beats, for the world is full of noise and booby traps. God guides around and through. The Divine is fearless. No one can take the Spirit from you; no one can hide your light, for brilliance is made up of quantum particles which seep through any darkness and the thickness of battle. Shine forth, and Seek. Knock. Find.